CPU and heatsinks

Two Intel Xeon X5690 processors

Two Thermalright HR-02 heatsinks

Two Scythe Kaze-Jyuni SY1225SL12HPVS 120mm PWM fans

Dual-processor Xeon chips based on Sandy Bridge aren't due out until Q4 of this year. This leaves us sticking with current Intel Xeon chips based on the previous Westmere-EP, which are still fast as hell—but starting to get shown up a bit by their Sandy Bridge siblings.

Still, putting twelve cores and more PCI-e connectivity into a single box than any mere desktop chip could dream of doesn't hurt, and as Techreport points out, Westmere is still very fast. Each X5670 processor has 3.46GHz base clock for six cores, 3.73GHz Turboboost, 12MB of L3 cache, and three channels of DDR3 memory, and a 130W TDP, and the God Box sports two of 'em.

Competition is a bit scarce, too. AMD's Magny-Cours chips, even in the fastest flavors (the 6180SE), are great in some tasks, particularly HPC (per Anandtech and others), Intel still holds a commanding lead in the typical workstation role a God Box plays, even with its current Westmere chips.

Keeping cool is a bit of a challenge, but Thermalright's HR-02 heatsinks are excellent performers at both higher and lower airflows. They're pretty large, but not anywhere near the largest 140mm-fan-capable monsters out today, so they shouldn't cause too many fitment issues, nor do they need crazy fans to keep cool. The Scythe Kaze-Jyuni 120mm PWM fans should be excellent for a blend of low noise at idle and higher airflow when needed at full load. At speeds of 500RPM to 1500RPM, and 24.5CFM to 81.64CFM, they should spin fast enough at idle to not cause the motherboard to freak out, either.

Motherboard and memory

Motherboards are a bit more complicated. Two double-wide graphics cards, a SAS RAID card, sound, and USB 3.0 is already seven slots' worth of cards. Fortunately everything today is PCI-e, which helps a little.

The Supermicro X8DTH-iF has seven PCI-e 2.0 x16 physical (x8 electrical) slots. Four slots for video (2x video + 2x blocked by GPU heatsinks), which leaves three slots left: one for SAS RAID, one for Firewire or USB 3.0, and one for a sound card.

Ideally, we'd feed full x16 bandwidth to the video cards, but such a beast apparently does not exist in an easily obtainable form. The fact that we're packing two high-power video cards in particular makes it tricky. The most ideal solution currently available is actually a Supermicro barebones (motherboard/chassis/power supply) that packs eight 3.5" hot-swap bays, appropriate PCI-e 2.0 x16 slots to feed full bandwidth to the video cards, and a 1400W PSU, the Supermicro 7046GT-TRF. With appropriate PWM-controlled fans, noise from it actually shouldn't be too bad, but it's not cheap and it doesn't give as much flexibility as picking our own components. That leaves us with the X8DTH-iF, which is still pretty decent. Twelve DIMM slots, six SATA 3Gbps ports, seven PCI-e 2.0 x16 (x8 electrical) slots, dual gigabit ethernet, lots of PWM-capable fan headers—it's plenty loaded. Memory is easy. Pick something off of the compatible list, and since we're staying at stock clocks, don't stress about it too much. We go with Registered ECC memory to maintain performance, with all of the banks filled with two DIMMs each for 48GB total, although 8GB sticks could be used for those who need more memory. Kingston's KVR1333D3D4R9S/4GEF modules are one of many on Supermicro's approved memory list.

Video

Two eVGA Geforce GTX 580 Black Ops

In single-GPU performance, NVIDIA's GF110 chips currently rule. Power consumption is no longer as obscene as the original GF100, but it's still high—the performance, at least, is worth it.

This means the obvious choice for the God Box is a pair of NVIDIA Geforce GTX 580 cards, in this case the eVGA Black Ops edition, which are even (very mildly) overclocked versus the reference cards at 797mHz core (vs. 772mHz), 1594mhz shader (vs. 1544mHz), and 1.5GB of memory at 4050mHz effective (vs. 4008mHz). They're big, expensive, power hungry, and fast for both games and GPU computing applications, which makes them very, very well suited to the God Box.

Technically, the single fastest card is AMD's dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990, which looks very fast. However, cooling two GPUs on a single card is always tough, and looking at the performance needed to drive games at 2560x1600, two single-GPU cards based off of the Radeon HD 6970 or GTX 580 look to be more than enough for 99 percent of situations. The other 1 percent? Well, given how much power a top-of-the-line dual-GPU setup already draws, we'd rather not deal with triple or quad top-of-the-line GPUs in the God Box.

There's performance, there's top-of-the-line performance, and then there's utter insanity. Or, as our original tagline goes, God wouldn't be a glutton. Nor would we like to see people having to run dedicated 20 amp circuits to their computer rooms just to power the God Box. (OK, that might actually be sort of awesome, but not really...)

Depending on the application, a pair of Radeon HD 6970s might make more sense, so please pick components carefully. For most games and most of the GPU computing that has passed through the Ars Orbiting HQ, the SLI'ed GTX 580s make more sense. Given the GTX 580's high price and high power consumption, though, a pair of CrossfireX'd Radeon HD 6970s might make sense in some situations, based on price, performance, and power consumption.

God Box builders worried less about absolute gaming performance and more about massive amounts of monitors may also want to consider AMD Radeon HD 6970s over NVIDIA alternatives, as AMD's Eyefinity6-capable cards are definitely worth a look.

Sound, communications

Network card: none (on-board)

ASUS Xonar D2X

While hard to justify in the Budget Box and Hot Rod, the God Box has sufficient room in the budget for a high-end consumer sound card like the ASUS Xonar D2X or ASUS Xonar Essence STX.

Even more critically, such a card is necessary, as the God Box motherboard lacks onboard sound. If you're a headphone user, the Essence STX may be preferable to the Xonar D2X, but for more general use, we recommend the D2X. The Xonar D2X provides hardware-accelerated positional sound via Direct3D and EAX, Dolby and DTS support, and a 118dB SNR (signal-to-noise ratio). Couple it with nice headphones or nicer speakers for the full experience, along with high-bitrate MP3s or, better yet, lossless audio from the original CDs or formats such as FLAC.

Long ago we used to recommend professional-grade cards from M-Audio or Terratec in the God Box, but those are unnecessary for mainstream use. If you need a card with eight input channels and XLR inputs, you probably know which one you need and why.

Finally, the motherboard's onboard Intel gigabit ethernet should be more than adequate for networking. In fact, we can't remember very many reasons why one would need a separate network interface card (NIC) in a standard desktop, even one as absurd as the God Box.

Primary Storage

LSI Logic 9261-8i SAS RAID

Two Corsair Force F240 240GB SSD

Four Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 SATA

Two Adaptec 2247000-R miniSAS fanout to SATA cable

The God Box needs two kinds of storage: very fast storage for the operating system (OS), applications, and scratch files, plus larger bulk storage for media files. Even with a budget in the low five-figures, enough very fast storage (SSDs) or even somewhat-less-fast storage (10K or 15K SAS disks) is prohibitively expensive for the God Box. Not to mention the tiny detail that a single user (or even a couple of users) is going to be hard-pressed to seriously strain a RAID1+0 or a RAID6 of 3TB 7200rpm disks.

The fun part is the very fast storage, which today is exclusively in the realm of SSDs (solid state disks). 2011 is seeing the transition from the current Sandforce (SF-1200/SF-1500), Marvell (88SS9174) and Intel X25-M G2 drives/controllers to the next-generation controllers from Sandforce (SF-2200/SF-2500) and presumably, at some point, tweaked controllers from Marvell and an improved one from Intel. A transition from 34nm NAND flash to 25nm NAND flash should also improve performance for SSDs in 2011, although the actual benefits are somewhat more complex than just improved performance.

At the moment, the situation with RAID controllers and TRIM is still somewhat complicated—and less than ideal (read: broken). For this reason, we recommend a pair the Sandforce-based Corsair Force F240 SSDs over the previous Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (Marvell-based) due to what should be better idle garbage collection in the Sandforce drives. If you are using a single-drive setup, then we'd say it's a toss-up between the two, and if you can wait for the SF-2200/2500 based drives to come out, those are looking mighty good too.

A single Corsair Force F240, like other Sandforce SSDs in its class, is rated for 285MB/sec sequential reads, 275MB/sec sequential writes, 50K IOPS (4k aligned), and an MTBF of 1,000,000 hours.

For bulk storage, high-end hardware RAID controllers such as the Adaptec 6805 and Areca ARC-1880i are all quite good. We stick with the LSI Logic MegaRAID 9261-8i as it remains competitive with its PowerPC-based RoC (RAID-on-chip) processor for the God Box's needs. This controller has been on the market the longest, so it probably has the most mature firmware and drivers compared to its competition from Adaptec and Areca.

For attaching drives to the SAS RAID controller's standard mini-SAS ports, we used Adaptec-branded cabling. These cables are cheap, reliable, and easily available, unlike some other brands of cables that we've found. We have no specific preference for these cables, so feel free to use whatever you prefer.

Drives are Hitachi's Ultrastar 7K3000 3TB SATA units, which, despite their relative newness to the market, have proven to work well. A RAID1+0 or a RAID6 would be 6TB usable, or if you prefer them in JBOD, the full 12TB would be usable, albeit with no redundancy whatsoever. Packing a 7200rpm spindle speed, a 5-platter design, 64MB of cache, and a 5 year warranty are all things to feel good about.

Seagate's Constellation ES.2 3TB drives have just been announced and are already qualified on some controllers, but they have yet to show up in retail channels. Sticking with 2TB drives would also work, but the cost difference between nearline 2TB and nearline 3TB drives is fairly minimal.